I just started using the Things app on the iPhone. It supports GTD concepts. Let’s see how long I can keep this up. It seems like I’m more productive already. I’ve been adding items to Things as they come up, and I’ve been checking things off. I think it will take time to adjust to this way of doing things. I’m use to keeping things in my head, but now I will need to trust that I have this system to help me so I can use the extra brain bandwidth on other things.

I stumbled upon one of Jeff LaMarche’s blog entries while searching for something else. This tells you how you can take a screenshot from an untethered iPhone. Just hold down the power button and then press and release the HOME button. Now the screenshot is saved in your Photo album.

The other way is for Developers using XCode. You tether the iPhone and open the Organizer window in XCode. Click on your iPhone under the DEVICES list at the left of the window. Click on the “Screenshot” tab, then click the “Capture” button. These screenshots are store: ~username/Library/Application Support/Developer/Shared/Xcode/Screenshots.

Learned about creating multiview applications today. Dave Mark and Jeff LaMarche are great teachers (Check out their book “Beginning iPhone Development“). I really like their teaching and writing style. It is ‘to the point’ and more in the philosophy of giving you incremental building blocks. It’s something that I’m use to and prefer. At ITP, that’s how we teach students. There’s a lot of technology involved and most do not have a technology background, so we need to arm them each week with a new tool, if you will, in their technology Swiss Army Knife, so that they can build cool things. We don’t get bogged down too much in the technical details or theory.

Once I installed the lastest SDK (2.2) all was fine. I was able to take screenshots from the Organizer within XCode. XCode was also able to connect to the iPhone device’s debugger. So the setup is good to go.

After some research, I finally found out the definitive answer for changing the Info.plist so that your app will run on a tethered device. Make sure you create a Bundle Seed Id. The Bundle Seed Id is a 10 character alpha-numeric ID. Then use it as the value for the Bundle identifier in the Info.plist. So you need to put something like this “##########.com.mycompany.HelloWorld” as the Bundle identifier. Now you’ll be able to run your app on your development device.

The Bundle display name can be set to anything. This is what shows up underneath the application icon on the iPhone desktop.

I find that I learn better through how-to guides as oppose to piecing it together. So, I have a couple of books by my side that I’m going to try to work with to build a very rudimentary, but somewhat interesting iPhone app. It might just be a throw away gag app, but I want to publish it in the App Store. Wish me luck!